Academia › The academy

The academy

A cooperative of about eleven thousand members, of whom fewer than two hundred are philologists. The members decide. The philologists prepare the note the members vote on.

What it is

The academy was constituted at Sederna in 1946 as a cooperative under Title III, licensed by the Congress of Planning like any other. It has no public function, exercises no authority, and issues nothing that binds a person, a cooperative, a commune or a court. Its work is description, publication and the running of surveys.

Membership is open to any person who uses the language, without qualification, examination or fee. Members are drawn into the working groups by lot for a term of two years, in the same manner as a jury, and a member may decline. The philologists sit in every working group and their votes are weighted no differently from anybody else's.

Why the users decide

A language with nineteen million speakers and no official status has no owner. The academy was founded on the position that a body describing such a language is accountable to its speakers, and the membership is constituted so that users outnumber philologists by about fifty to one.

The arrangement is criticised. A large lay membership is slow, it is conservative about spelling, and it has twice refused a reform the philologists thought right. The academy's stated answer is that a body which overrules its speakers stops describing the language and begins inventing one.

What the academy publishes

• The lexicon, revised continuously, open to anyone to take.
• The registers of irregular and alternate forms.
• The description of the grammar, marked advisory throughout.
• The phrasebook, including the emergency wording, with the test results behind it.
• The register of decisions, with the surveys, the votes and the withdrawals.
• The survey data themselves, anonymised, in the same open form as the lexicon.

What it cannot do

• It cannot fix an official spelling, because there is no official language to spell.
• It cannot appear before a court on a question of meaning; it may publish a note and the court may read it or not.
• It cannot remove a word from the lexicon for being coarse.

Putting a question

Any person may put a question, in any language, and receive a reasoned answer. Questions are taken at the counter of any commune library, through the public information system, or by post to the academy at Sederna. The correspondence is published with the name removed unless the person asks otherwise.